---
title: "Tech stocks tumble as investors question how the AI boom is being financed"
description: "Technology shares suffered one of their worst weeks in a year as anxiety mounted over the debt and spending behind the artificial-intelligence buildout, with Oracle posting its steepest monthly decline since the dot-com bust."
category: "Business"
category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/business
author: "Lucas Silva"
published: 2026-06-27T01:11:00.000Z
updated: 2026-06-27T01:11:00.000Z
canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/tech-stocks-ai-financing-selloff
tags: ["technology", "artificial-intelligence", "stock-market", "oracle", "semiconductors", "nasdaq"]
---
# Tech stocks tumble as investors question how the AI boom is being financed

Technology shares suffered one of their worst weeks in a year as anxiety mounted over the debt and spending behind the artificial-intelligence buildout, with Oracle posting its steepest monthly decline since the dot-com bust.

A wave of unease about how the artificial-intelligence boom is being paid for sent technology stocks reeling in the week ending June 26, handing the sector one of its worst stretches in a year and reviving questions about whether the AI trade has run ahead of itself.

## Oracle's historic slide

No company embodied the week's anxiety more than Oracle. The database and cloud company fell about 29% over the month of June — its worst monthly performance since August 2001, near the bottom of the dot-com collapse, [CNBC reported](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/26/oracle-stock-ends-worst-week-since-2001-as-investors-dwell-on-finances.html). A drop of that magnitude has occurred only a handful of times since the company went public in 1986.

The selling intensified after Oracle's latest results, which beat earnings expectations but laid bare the cost of its AI ambitions. The company spent close to $56 billion on capital expenditures in its 2026 fiscal year — up roughly 162% — and reported negative free cash flow of nearly $24 billion, as it raced to build data centers to fulfill enormous cloud-computing commitments. Oracle was carrying about $130 billion in debt at the end of May, and has signaled it will need to raise tens of billions more to sustain the spending, according to CNBC. Investors, long willing to reward ambition, balked at the strain on the company's cash.

## Chips and the Nasdaq feel the pain

The damage spread well beyond Oracle. The Nasdaq Composite logged multiple losing sessions, and semiconductor shares — the hardware backbone of the AI build-out — were among the hardest hit as investors reassessed how quickly that spending would translate into profit. The selloff rippled overseas, weighing on Asian chipmakers whose fortunes are tied to the same demand.

## The financing question

What unsettled markets was less any single earnings miss than a growing recognition that the AI expansion is increasingly being funded with borrowed money. The concern crystallized around SpaceX's decision to raise a large slug of debt in the bond market shortly after its public listing, a reminder that even the most richly valued names in the field are leaning on leverage to finance their AI bets.

The four largest U.S. technology spenders — Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta — are collectively on course to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into capital projects this year, much of it for AI infrastructure, even as free cash flow at several has come under pressure. With Federal Reserve officials signaling that interest rates may stay higher for longer, the cost of financing those projects becomes harder to ignore.

None of this means the AI growth story is over. Demand for AI computing remains strong, and some chipmakers posted solid underlying results even as their shares fell. But the market is now asking a sharper question: not whether AI will prove transformative, but whether the debt being taken on to build it will pay off before the bills come due. For a sector accustomed to rewarding ambition first, that is a meaningful shift in mood.